Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Scholarly Articles

In an event where the problem of information access is almost terra incognita, the derivate challenge is whether too much information is bad. Most research suggests so, yet very few attempts have been made to examine the digital inequalities and literacies that shape how an individual is exposed, consumes, shares, and ends up believing in fake news. This study builds upon focus group data from six sub-Saharan countries to examine how people in sub-Saharan Africa engage with misinformation. This study focuses on variations in digital access and literacy, which indicate how individuals in Africa are exposed to, consume, spread, and believe in misinformation. The findings suggest that access is not an impediment to fake news exposure, consumption, or sharing. However, the presumed news-literate individuals did not seem to believe in misinformation, except in events that compromised their moral fiber. Because of eco-chambers, news-literate people were more susceptible to misinformation. The overall findings question the notion of news literacy and whether it is indeed a panacea for fighting misinformation.

Preserving records of what user content is taken down—and why—could make platforms more accountable and transparent.

In 2018, German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel appointed a group of nine scholars and practitioners, including BKC’s Urs Gasser, to the German Digital Council (GDC). The GDC was formed with the unusual mission to ask both critical and constructive questions about government projects from a digital perspective, to alert the government to new technical and economic developments, and operate as a symbol for 'digitalization' during its interactions with the government.

While the GDC has made significant contributions since its founding, its operation has been fairly opaque; this opacity was an intentional part of the GDC’s operational strategy. As a consequence, the basic design, structure, operation, and impact of the GDC have not been easily accessible beyond a relatively small group of involved parties.

At the same time, the unusual mission, composition, and mode of operation of the GDC have been met with interest from governments around the world and other stakeholders that are confronted with the question of how to bring outside expertise into the workings of a government. This case study is an attempt to bridge this knowledge gap by documenting and sharing some of the important and, thus far, undocumented details about the formation and operation of the GDC. The insights shared are based on a series of group and individual interviews that the authors conducted with members of the GDC and members of the Chancellery that worked closely with the GDC.

German Digital Council: An “Inside-Out” Case Study is an output of the BKC Policy Practice, a program that helps governmental, nonprofit, and private sector organizations work through challenging questions related to technology and society.

In a group of eight Twitter bots distributing content from eight museum digital collections, none are affiliated with the collections they harvest from.

From this group of Twitter bots distributing content sourced from museum digital collections, we can take a closer look at who they are and how they’re changing the discoverability of digital collection content.

This report addresses a number of key considerations that those managing open source software de- velopment initiatives should take into account when thinking about structure, organization, and gov- ernance. The genesis of this project involved an investigation into anecdotal reports that companies and other institutions developing open source software were facing difficulties obtaining tax exempt nonprofit status under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. Based on conversations with a number of constituents in the open source software development community, the authors have prepared this report to address specific questions about nonprofit status alongside questions about corporate formation and governance models more generally. Nothing in this report should be viewed as a substitute for specific legal advice on the narrow ques- tions facing particular organizations under particular sets of factual circumstances. But, the authors are hopeful the document provides a general overview of the complex issues that open source initia- tives face when balancing a need for structure and continuity with the innovative and experimental spirit at the heart of many open source development projects.

The boxes for prescription drugs typically include an insert of tissue-thin paper folded as tight as origami. For the bored or the preternaturally curious who unfurl it, there’s a sketch of the drug’s molecular structure using a notation that harkens to high school chemistry, along with PRECAUTIONS and DOSAGE AND ADMINISTRATION and HOW SUPPLIED. And for many drugs, under CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY, one finds a sentence like this one for the wakefulness drug Nuvigil, after the subheading “Mechanism of Action”: “The mechanism(s) through which modafinil promotes wakefulness is unknown.” That sentence alone might provoke wakefulness without assistance from the drug. How is it that something could be studied and scrutinized enough to find its way to regulatory approval and widespread prescribing, while we don’t know how it works?